“Yeah, being sarcastic. But he did some research on the whole thing himself, and it’s raised questions on hospital maternity care in his mind as well. Finally, he said that my comfort level was the number one priority in our birth going well. So I’ll decide.”
I smiled into my cell phone screen. “You got a good one. And I’m honored that you would ask me to be present at the birth.”
I would make sure nothing bad happened to that baby, even if Jane and I didn’t speak a word through every contraction.
“You and Mom mean the world to me.” Did her voice crack?
“You’re a good girl,” I said, and my heart fluttered.
I was dying to ask about Jane, but it’d gotten me nowhere with Kelsey the last few days. She’d just say, “You know Mom.” Poor Kelsey, always stuck in the middle.
“And how are you feeling?” I asked. “Any cravings?”
“Thankfully, no. I have another checkup next week. But I have put on a couple more pounds.” Kelsey pinched her nonexistent love handles.
“I can’t see it on you,” I said. I became more sober. “How’s your mom?”
I’d asked anyway. I couldn’t help it.
“Three more days until we know something on her breast. Given the circumstances, I think she’s doing okay. She’s coming to terms about Kathleen, too. You’ll see, Grandma.”
If that were the case, why hadn’t Kelsey begun this call with that headline? Why hadn’t Jane answered her phone?
Kelsey blew me kisses, and despite my reservations, my spirits couldn’t help but lift as I caught each one.
I needed to reach out to Jane. Texting was a challenge—holding the phone at the same time I typed with one crooked, shaky finger—but I’d try that instead of calling.
I texted: Hi, how are you doing today?
I waited. I did light stretches for my arms, back, and legs, the same moves I’d done with Jack LaLanne during his exercise show in the 1950s. I poured a cup of coffee. I tuned into my favorite TV cooking programs, which I couldn’t pay attention to. By the time they were over, an hour had passed.
How long would Jane’s silent treatment last? Surely she didn’t think we’d go the rest of our lives without hashing everything out. Should I text again? Try calling? Should I just settle down because she was probably taking a bath? I lowered the volume on the TV, reclined on the couch, and rested my head on a plump, fringed pillow. When I roused from a catnap another hour later, I saw that Jane had responded.
Jane: I went for a walk in the park.
Eight little words. I’d never been so relieved to read a message in all my life. There was hope.
Me: Good, good.
Jane: We’ll get together soon.
I wanted to print and frame this message and tape it to my fridge. I wanted to ask when, where? But I dared not push Jane. We’d made progress. I might even get two hours’ sleep that night.
Me: You’re going to get through this.
Maybe we both would get through this. I would do everything in my power to make it so.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
September 1951
I should have kept my trap shut about Nurse Breck.
“Mil, you aren’t seriously considering calling her?” Dennis said between drags off his cigarette. He’d laid out his clothes for the day on our bed. “You’ve got to put this to rest.”
“But—”
“Don’t you think I suffer too? My God, I’ve never been through anything so wrenching as these last months. But I know that you and Janie have to eat. It’s my responsibility to earn a living. Put food on the table. So I keep my lips zipped, and earn I do.”
I was shocked into silence. He’d called his experience “wrenching.” So it wasn’t just my agony alone.
Yet his further meaning was clear: I had my responsibilities, too. I needed to move forward, avoid going backward. He trailed me to the kitchen.
“You’re right,” I said to be amenable. “I don’t know that I can bear to hear whatever the nurse says anyway.”
“This nurse—Breck, is it?” Dennis said, spotting her number on the napkin on the counter. “I remember her. She was nice to me on the ward. But here’s the thing: no matter what, it can’t bring Kathy back.”
I started. This was the first time he’d spoken our daughter’s name since she died. The nickname I’d given her, at that. It bowled me over: he’d said her name I’d longed to hear. That was forward progress for him. I wouldn’t go backward. I was a good mother to Janie. A good wife. I wasn’t perfect after all, but I’d work harder to show Dennis Glenn how well I performed my duties. And I didn’t even need a pill to prove it.
“You’re right,” I said. “It won’t bring Kathy back.” I exhaled, realizing I’d been holding my breath.
He wadded up the napkin with its black raspberry ice cream stains and Nurse Breck’s number and threw it into the kitchen trash bin.
The next morning I arose early and served pancakes for breakfast. For Janie’s, I made a smiley-face pancake. I dolloped batter, a teaspoonful at a time, onto the hot buttered griddle, placing the dollops in the position where two eyes and a curved mouth would be. Once those bits cooked to a toasty brown, I poured a ladle of more batter carefully over top in the shape of a nice, round flapjack. When I flipped it over, the face was visible on top as the underside batter sizzled. Janie adored smiley-face pancakes, and if she was a good girl and wore her bib without fussing, she got her own tiny pitcher to drizzle Aunt Jemima over the bites that she’d eat with her fingers—although Janie’s drizzle was more like a downpour.
When she beckoned, working her fingers for me to bend over and give her kisses, I did, with bliss, and I didn’t mind that she got sticky maple syrup in my hair.
It was ten a.m. and I held my pad and pencil, trying to scratch out a grocery list: bread, spinach, feminine toiletries. Another monthly period had arrived. I wanted to go nine months without one—I could hardly wait to try again to have another child. After the course of this cycle was past, it was time. I’d have clearance to be sexually active again.
That was one of two thoughts interrupting every hour of my day. That and the thought of calling Nurse Breck. I couldn’t help it, no matter what I’d told Dennis; no matter how I’d thought I’d let the idea of calling the nurse pass, I was wrong.
Noon. Janie was in her high chair, and I fed her some Gerber baby peaches from a jar. She kept grabbing for the spoon. Mother Glenn had said that meant Janie was about ready to feed herself. So I poured the peaches into a small bowl.
“Here, sweetie-pie,” I said, handing her the stubby, baby-size silver spoon. “Mommy’s going to let you feed yourself.”
In minutes her chubby cheeks were smeared orange, sticky clear to her hair—and runny peaches were splattered on her tray, on her bib, and on the floor—but she was living it up, and I was happy to let her. I usually had a damp rag in hand mopping every drop. Today I’d clean it later.
All I could think about was calling Nurse Breck.
By one thirty, when Young Doctor Malone came on the radio and Janie was entranced with her Buzzy Bee toy, my reminder of the day before when Janie almost got stung—the day I also discovered Nurse Breck—I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to know. I had to know what the nurse could tell me. I’d taken one pill, but it had little effect.
I imagined myself ancient—maybe ninety years old—in a semiprivate room in a nursing home, wondering what had happened that March 23. Might I be lying listless on a disinfected mattress all alone, looking back on my life and asking: Why hadn’t I placed the call?
No matter what I would learn by asking, I reasoned, surely knowing would be better than not knowing.
Nurse Breck might know what I’d done wrong when I was pregnant. Maybe I had overexerted myself with Janie, ingested too much salt, or not taken enough vitamins. And I continued to be plagued: What if Abbie had been right? What if my work with Gunnison Homes had impaired my child’s health in my womb? If Nurse
Breck told me that any of my actions had affected the baby—anything leading to brain damage, to the big word that started with an E—I would be racked by more guilt.
But I would know better how to go through my next pregnancy. I’d find out on behalf of the next child.
I jerked open the cabinet door under the sink to get the trash. I had to have that Graeter’s ice cream napkin. Damn. Dennis had taken the wastebasket out while I was getting Janie dressed. Janie was toddling around the living room now, but she’d be okay for a minute. I ran in my house slippers out the back door, letting the screen door slam behind me. I charged through the breezeway to the garage and attacked the large metal bin. I threw off the lid, letting it clang on the concrete floor. The garbage crew was due the next day, so the container was rank with week-old chicken scraps and days-old spilt milk. I opened the bag, the one recently deposited on top, and was greeted with a sticky mess—remnants of our scraped-off breakfast plates with syrup and pancakes and fried sausage grease.
I dug deeper into the next-to-last layer of refuse. I hoped I’d find that wadded-up Graeter’s napkin, and if I did, that Nurse Breck’s number would be legible. I dug and I dug. There, there it was, between the clean side of butcher’s paper and a strip of aluminum foil.
I yanked the small wad out, gingerly unfolded it, held up my thigh, and flattened the napkin against it. Yes, I could read it. Was the second number a one or a seven? The last digit was faded (a three? an eight?). I’d try every numerical combination.
Oh my gosh, Janie. I crammed the trash back into its bin, slammed the lid on, and ran.
When I returned to Janie, she was sitting on her knees on the floor in her bedroom, flipping the pages of Goodnight Moon, mumbling, pretending to read it to herself. What a good little girl. She was fine. My heartbeat evened out. In recent days she had started tugging on her own socks. Now she was feeding herself with a spoon. Brushing her own hair, sort of. She would be grown before we knew it.
I tried calling Nurse Breck twice—at least I’d concluded I had her number after getting it wrong a couple of times—and when no one answered, I took it as a warning that I was not to know the truth.
But something grabbed my heart and pushed it up my throat, urging me to try again the next day, when it was Pauline’s morning to keep the babies.
One last try. I spun the rotary dial and crossed my fingers.
“Hello?” It sounded like her. The moment had arrived, but I couldn’t speak.
“Hello? Anyone there?” she said.
“Nurse Breck? Carolyn?”
“Mrs. Glenn, is that you?”
“Yes,” I said. Had I heard hesitation in her voice?
“I imagine you’ve called to learn more about that day in the hospital, but I’m afraid I’m having misgivings.”
“I, well, but I must know, to help my next baby.”
Silence.
“Please?”
“All right, all right. We can talk,” she said, and my shoulders rose and fell. “But we should meet somewhere. Somewhere quiet.”
Relief overtook me. “Eden Park, tomorrow?” It was the first place that popped into my head: public, but not crowded like a restaurant. No waitresses butting in. Nurse Breck or I could leave at any time. The art museum in the park was under renovations, and kids were back in school, so park visitors wouldn’t overwhelm.
“Yes,” she said. “Noon, at the gazebo.” A hint in her voice made me fear she’d back out.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
September 1951
Eden Park overlooked the city and the Ohio River Valley from high atop Cincinnati’s Mount Adams. The day was mildly breezy and warm. Pauline completely understood my plan and reasons for it, kept Janie with her, and dropped me off a few minutes before noon. I stood alone in the turn-of-the-century Spring House Gazebo, though a couple of bicyclists rode nearby. The gazebo had arches and scallops and ornamental spheres brought to life with paint of pale green and antique white. Inside I leaned against one of the pillars, remembering what had happened under this clay tile roof seven years before. Dennis Glenn had gotten down on one knee and proposed. It had been blistering cold that early December, but fluffy white flakes fell all around us, as if we were in a magical snow globe of our own making.
That day seemed forever ago. But there was a tiny, hidden piece of me that remembered that day, remembered what it was to be carefree. I reveled in it until reality came hurtling back.
After I’d changed my mind yesterday about meeting with Nurse Breck, I couldn’t look Dennis in the eye during dinner, and I retired to bed early by claiming a headache. Deceiving him was not in my nature. But meeting the nurse was something I had to do for myself—and for my next baby.
I checked my wristwatch every few seconds. Two minutes past twelve, three minutes past. No sign of Carolyn Breck. Would the maternity nurse leave me hanging?
“Mrs. Glenn?” I snapped to the sound of her voice behind me.
“Nurse Breck.” We were both back to formalities. Perhaps it was easier that way. “Shall we walk?” I asked shyly. I would reserve this gazebo for only my happiest memories.
We headed out past Mirror Lake, the sun warming us.
“I love your outfit,” she said.
“Thank you. And I yours.”
I was casual in straight-legged cigarette pants with a large black-and-beige plaid. Tucked into my waist was a lightweight mock-turtleneck sweater. Nurse Breck looked like a debutante, attired in a double-breasted coat dress with French cuffs halfway to her elbows. Her red lipstick was accentuated by her beauty mark. To a few preschool-age children running races across the way or their mothers pushing babies in buggies, Nurse Breck and I must look like two old friends out for a stroll. But I was anxious to begin. I slid on some sunglasses. “Please,” I said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“Are you sure? This isn’t going to be easy.”
So it was worse than I’d thought. I’d done something unpardonable.
“Yes,” I said. “Please tell me.”
“All right. Part of the reason I’m here is because I want to disabuse you of any misconceptions you have. Put things straight. I genuinely care about your family.”
I could feel the tension cross my brow.
She took a breath. “On the day of your daughter’s birth, I’d come on shift at half past four. Nurses were in short supply, and I’d never seen the ward in such a bustle. The beds were full. A friend who worked the nursery said she’d fed more than twenty babies the night before, every four hours. But as my supervisor had said when I checked in, ‘What are we supposed to do? Turn women away? They can’t give birth in the streets.’”
“I recall I had to wait for a wheelchair to free up.”
Nurse Breck turned to me and shielded the sun from her eyes with her hand. “It’s best for you to understand, if there was one thing nursing students had drilled into their heads, it’s that if they expect to be nurses and stay employed, they must comply with doctors’ orders.”
I nodded. I’d been privy to more than one nurse’s deference to doctors.
“Nurses like Nurse Tibbers and I manage childbirth, from sedating patients to sorting instruments for deliveries. That doesn’t count the few difficult cases, the operations. In all our work we’re carrying out doctors’ orders. We do not offer opinion. We do not question. We do not disobey.”
I strode along, wondering why she was making such a point of this. The breeze caught a whiff of Nurse Breck’s perfume then, sending citrus and floral notes my way. We continued to walk in our own little world. Young girls in pigtails played off in the distance; older men threw horseshoes, too far away to hear us.
“Nurse Tibbers prepared you for surgery. I started the IV and attached your monitors.
“Dr. Reynolds had been on call that night, and because the ward was so crowded, he had gotten the summons from Dr. Collins, your original OB. Dr. Reynolds didn’t show until six o’clock, later than normal. His hair was mussed, his ti
e loose.” Her steps picked up pace—I assumed they matched the rate of her heart or her need to have this tale over with. “He wasn’t slurring his words, but I could tell before he masked up.”
“You could tell what?”
After a runner went by, Nurse Breck said: “I could smell the alcohol on him from two feet away.”
My body shook. “The doctor had been drinking?”
“Yes. Quite a bit, I think.”
This was nothing I could have expected to hear. Doctors healed people. My mind felt frenzied. Was this why Nurse Breck had been reluctant to talk at first? Bile inched its way up my throat.
She pointed to a green-painted bench that had just freed up. “Shall we?” We proceeded to the shady spot, which was remote enough from other park guests. It felt good to sit down—to have something to catch me. And I could face Nurse Breck better as she spoke.
“Dr. Reynolds was moving slower than normal,” she said. “I’d seen him this way on two prior occasions. Nurse Tibbers looked at me and without speaking, we both knew that we’d have to stay on our toes.
“He wasn’t shaky when he made the vertical incision. He went in for your uterus and made that cut fine, too. I was relieved. But then he stalled. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He belched. I thought he might vomit. I didn’t think he’d be able to finish.”
She looked out over the vast expanse of lawn, now active with more young children in shorts and sneakers. What had the doctor done to me while I slept?
“What else?” I said, sounding more agitated than I intended.
“Your heartbeat was fine. All your vitals were normal. The doctor recovered and reached in. We were almost home. As he lifted your infant out, I could see it was a girl. She had her sweet little thumb in her mouth,” Nurse Breck said, and then she hesitated, fidgeting with her purse strap. “You know, it’s difficult for me to tell you this.”
My daughter had sucked her thumb while she lived. If only I could smile at the picture this evoked. But I tasted the metal flint of blood in my mouth, unaware until then of how I’d been biting the insides of my cheeks. Perspiration had dampened my top, too.
Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel Page 20